BSN programs and liberal arts: IHE article

[quasihumanist]

On a different thread recently, people have asserted that resources cannot/should not be diverted to help those who need additional help to succeed in college.

It's true that the word 'Black' does not appear in that post, but the net effect is few people of color who come from low SES get a good college education or indeed any college education.

Diverting college resources to nursing to be checkbox inclusive seems like a bad idea when the goal should be more nurses graduated or more anyone getting a college education by being more inclusive of what college students need to be successful.

If a student hasn't had much of a K-12 education (even if they do okay on the standardized tests), then 2 or 4 years of college cannot do the work of 14 or 16 years of education.

By the time someone has graduated from high school, there is no good solution for this problem.

I don't know what the least bad solution is.

[ciao_yall]

On a different thread recently, people have asserted that resources cannot/should not be diverted to help those who need additional help to succeed in college.

It's true that the word 'Black' does not appear in that post, but the net effect is few people of color who come from low SES get a good college education or indeed any college education.

Diverting college resources to nursing to be checkbox inclusive seems like a bad idea when the goal should be more nurses graduated or more anyone getting a college education by being more inclusive of what college students need to be successful.

If a student hasn't had much of a K-12 education (even if they do okay on the standardized tests), then 2 or 4 years of college cannot do the work of 14 or 16 years of education.

By the time someone has graduated from high school, there is no good solution for this problem.

I don't know what the least bad solution is.

Well, giving up on people seems worse than trying to remediate their education so that they can become productive members of society.

[ciao_yall]

Reed's comment about the demand for a cosmetology program reminds me of a comment my own barber once made:  "Half the little girls in town who don't know what they want to do for a living go to [the local beauty college] to learn to cut hair.  They don't realize how hard it is to open your own shop and build your own clientele."  The market for hair stylists is permanently flooded because there's only room for so many, and yet, such is the lack of imagination among youths looking for a career, there are legions who can't figure out what else to try to be.

This reminds me of a piece in The New Yorker or Harper's some years ago.  The subject was the permanent-disability system and the extent to which getting on it represented the only life-goal for many of the article's subjects (in eastern Kentucky).  One woman, who was trying to claim permanent-disability because she couldn't stand up all day (to be, e.g., a cashier), was asked to imagine a job that would allow for occasional sitting.  She could only come up with one answer: working at the disability office.

Perhaps education is the answer, but I sometimes wonder if we're asking education to do too much.

Hence, "career day" in school. People came to talk about what they did and why they enjoyed it. Kids thought about jobs, and job satisfaction, and envisioned themselves in jobs they never knew existed.

[marshwiggle]

On a different thread recently, people have asserted that resources cannot/should not be diverted to help those who need additional help to succeed in college.

It's true that the word 'Black' does not appear in that post, but the net effect is few people of color who come from low SES get a good college education or indeed any college education.

Diverting college resources to nursing to be checkbox inclusive seems like a bad idea when the goal should be more nurses graduated or more anyone getting a college education by being more inclusive of what college students need to be successful.

If a student hasn't had much of a K-12 education (even if they do okay on the standardized tests), then 2 or 4 years of college cannot do the work of 14 or 16 years of education.

By the time someone has graduated from high school, there is no good solution for this problem.

I don't know what the least bad solution is.

Well, giving up on people seems worse than trying to remediate their education so that they can become productive members of society.

I think the problem with remediation as it is often practiced, is that it is seen as something trivial that can be done with minimal impact on the time to finish a degree. So, a person with a lousy high school experience will maybe take one "remedial" course in first year and it's supposed to magically get them up to speed. In reality, they probably really need at least a complete year of remedial work to get them close to ready for first year.

But for all kinds of reasons, that's not a popular option.

[ciao_yall]

On a different thread recently, people have asserted that resources cannot/should not be diverted to help those who need additional help to succeed in college.

It's true that the word 'Black' does not appear in that post, but the net effect is few people of color who come from low SES get a good college education or indeed any college education.

Diverting college resources to nursing to be checkbox inclusive seems like a bad idea when the goal should be more nurses graduated or more anyone getting a college education by being more inclusive of what college students need to be successful.

If a student hasn't had much of a K-12 education (even if they do okay on the standardized tests), then 2 or 4 years of college cannot do the work of 14 or 16 years of education.

By the time someone has graduated from high school, there is no good solution for this problem.

I don't know what the least bad solution is.

Well, giving up on people seems worse than trying to remediate their education so that they can become productive members of society.

I think the problem with remediation as it is often practiced, is that it is seen as something trivial that can be done with minimal impact on the time to finish a degree. So, a person with a lousy high school experience will maybe take one "remedial" course in first year and it's supposed to magically get them up to speed. In reality, they probably really need at least a complete year of remedial work to get them close to ready for first year.

But for all kinds of reasons, that's not a popular option.

Fine. A year, then. Maybe two. What is the alternative?

[polly_mer]

Fine. A year, then. Maybe two. What is the alternative?

1) Fixing K-12 education to really be education instead of some box checking that is mostly warehousing of the youth. 

For example, Career Day doesn't work when there really are very few jobs in town other than teacher, police officer, farmer, road crew, and medical personnel at the hospital. 

I grew up in that town and we were the big town for almost 50 miles.  Technically, there are other jobs.  For example, there was a dentist office with a receptionist and two dental hygienists in addition to the dentist.  However, much like the cosmeticians upthread, it's not a growth market that more supply will meet.  The handful of people who work at the county courthouse aren't going to substantially grow in number and turnover is low.  There were a couple restaurants in town that were family-owned that needed additional help in the summer due to the tourists.  However, the town couldn't support one new restaurant per year and there was never going to be a market for fine dining.

It's not necessarily a lack of imagination on what else can be done when one is realistic about a small enough town where even becoming a secretary means having real skills that are rare enough (e.g., short hand is still a thing; making pivot tables with Excel; wrestling the database into submission) that people will pay extra.

2) Sighing heavily about the increasing reality that we don't need the majority of the adults in US society to work to keep the rest of us going.  That's not an education problem.  That's a problem that results from a combination of automation, better technology, and changes in mindset about what needs to be done.  The secretarial pools are basically gone as each person enters their own data and types their own email until you get high enough to have an executive assistant, which is far more than a secretary.  Many of the clerk positions are gone, again as the clients/students/public enter their own data into the online forms.  A lot of the entry-level positions that allowed one to climb a corporate ladder are simply gone because we don't need them any more.

That's even more true of people who don't have the social capital to get into the networks drawing from the elite enough institutions where a college degree in anything is really more a marker of social class than a desirable skill set.

This is the nursing thread.  The reason many people want to be nurses is a clear path becoming a solid member of the middle class with the ability to get a similar job if a given employer closes.  The sad reality is many rural hospitals are closing.  However, moving as a nurse is possible, if not personally desirable.  Advertisements for nurses exist and it's quite reasonable for someone who is willing to move to get hired at a place where the individual knows no one.  That's not at all true for many other positions that are never advertised because the pool is already big enough with relatives, neighbors, friends, and others who can be given an interview and someone is hired without ever a formal advertisement.

Academia is unusual because nearly every faculty position for longer than one term will be advertised nationally.  Most other industries don't work like that.

[quasihumanist]

On a different thread recently, people have asserted that resources cannot/should not be diverted to help those who need additional help to succeed in college.

It's true that the word 'Black' does not appear in that post, but the net effect is few people of color who come from low SES get a good college education or indeed any college education.

Diverting college resources to nursing to be checkbox inclusive seems like a bad idea when the goal should be more nurses graduated or more anyone getting a college education by being more inclusive of what college students need to be successful.

If a student hasn't had much of a K-12 education (even if they do okay on the standardized tests), then 2 or 4 years of college cannot do the work of 14 or 16 years of education.

By the time someone has graduated from high school, there is no good solution for this problem.

I don't know what the least bad solution is.

Well, giving up on people seems worse than trying to remediate their education so that they can become productive members of society.

I think the problem with remediation as it is often practiced, is that it is seen as something trivial that can be done with minimal impact on the time to finish a degree. So, a person with a lousy high school experience will maybe take one "remedial" course in first year and it's supposed to magically get them up to speed. In reality, they probably really need at least a complete year of remedial work to get them close to ready for first year.

But for all kinds of reasons, that's not a popular option.

Fine. A year, then. Maybe two. What is the alternative?

Honestly, I think it's more like four to six years of remediation.  Maybe more.  I see first year students coming in without even the notion that humans can think rather than just memorize facts and procedures from stone tablets, and I'm pretty sure I'd progressed beyond that in elementary school.

[Wahoo Redux]

Fine. A year, then. Maybe two. What is the alternative?

Sighing heavily about the increasing reality that we don't need the majority of the adults in US society to work to keep the rest of us going.  That's not an education problem.  That's a problem that results from a combination of automation, better technology, and changes in mindset about what needs to be done.  The secretarial pools are basically gone as each person enters their own data and types their own email until you get high enough to have an executive assistant, which is far more than a secretary.  Many of the clerk positions are gone, again as the clients/students/public enter their own data into the online forms.  A lot of the entry-level positions that allowed one to climb a corporate ladder are simply gone because we don't need them any more.

Maybe...kind'a...or not.

I know that you are well informed enough to have seen articles like this and this.

And there is a study (I don't feel like searching for it right now) that looks at the attitudes toward agricultural technology at the turn of the 20th century----people had very much the same fears about automation that we do, yet overall employment and wealth increased because of all the new machine-based jobs steadily created since the industrial revolution.

In other words, it is doubtful that we have killed opportunity through cyber-technology.  Elder jobs (such as telephone operators) are extinct, obviously, but other jobs took their place.  We should see the same phenomenon again.  The problem, it seems to me, rests with people (coal miners, loggers) who cannot adjust and lack the capital and foresight to do so.  Agile minds make for better Darwinian possibilities.  This is where education comes in: hail education!!

[kaysixteen]

What exactly do you suggest that those coal miners and other middle aged working class folks from dying industries do?   That they did not have the 'foresight' 30 years ago to predict what would happen to their industries, whether or not that is a blameworthy thing to hold against them, is water under the bridge, any more than similarly aged PhDs like myself, who believed the propaganda and bad predictions regarding the supposed vast increase in available professor positions set to arise by the late 90s, can do anything to change their choices, as well... now what?

[Wahoo Redux]

What exactly do you suggest that those coal miners and other middle aged working class folks from dying industries do?   That they did not have the 'foresight' 30 years ago to predict what would happen to their industries, whether or not that is a blameworthy thing to hold against them, is water under the bridge, any more than similarly aged PhDs like myself, who believed the propaganda and bad predictions regarding the supposed vast increase in available professor positions set to arise by the late 90s, can do anything to change their choices, as well... now what?

I'm from logging country. 30 years ago the timber industry sounded all sorts of alarms.  Not all loggers, but many, simply refused to believe that their livelihood was endangered and then reacted with fury and obstinacy when the logging towns began dying.  They threatened, they held rallies, they slaughtered spotted owls. They refused to leave their towns or receive retraining.   Surviving now in an industry which is teetering, I understand some of this----and I appreciate your predicament the same as mine.  Logging was not just a job, it was a lifestyle; it was where one lived, what one did with one's life, who one associated with, how one dressed, the environment one worked , what one did with one's future.  Same as us.

But this sort of scenario is not a choice we make but a choice that is thrust upon us.  This is what having an agile mine is all about.  The "now what" is one's ability to move on.  Otherwise I am not sure what your question is about.

[Hibush]

What exactly do you suggest that those coal miners and other middle aged working class folks from dying industries do?   That they did not have the 'foresight' 30 years ago to predict what would happen to their industries, whether or not that is a blameworthy thing to hold against them, is water under the bridge, any more than similarly aged PhDs like myself, who believed the propaganda and bad predictions regarding the supposed vast increase in available professor positions set to arise by the late 90s, can do anything to change their choices, as well... now what?

I'm from logging country. 30 years ago the timber industry sounded all sorts of alarms.  Not all loggers, but many, simply refused to believe that their livelihood was endangered and then reacted with fury and obstinacy when the logging towns began dying.  They threatened, they held rallies, they slaughtered spotted owls. They refused to leave their towns or receive retraining.   Surviving now in an industry which is teetering, I understand some of this----and I appreciate your predicament the same as mine.  Logging was not just a job, it was a lifestyle; it was where one lived, what one did with one's life, who one associated with, how one dressed, the environment one worked , what one did with one's future.  Same as us.

But this sort of scenario is not a choice we make but a choice that is thrust upon us.  This is what having an agile mine is all about.  The "now what" is one's ability to move on.  Otherwise I am not sure what your question is about.

In farming country, the identity issues are similar. While farm productivity is up, the need for labor is down. Some of the big grain farms are 4,000 acres with two operators. At that density, to get a town of 10,000 people, you would need an area the size of Missouri. Obviously, that is not a socially functional scenario. Those regions will empty, with individual cities existing because there is a need for a city per se, not a commercial base for the farmers.

The difference is the desirability of the employment. Hardly anyone outside of agriculture wants to be a grain farmer. High financial risk, low profit, isolation, stress, danger....

Young people in agriculture also don't want to be operators. Mostly they want to move to the city and live a secure life among people.

[marshwiggle]

What exactly do you suggest that those coal miners and other middle aged working class folks from dying industries do?   That they did not have the 'foresight' 30 years ago to predict what would happen to their industries, whether or not that is a blameworthy thing to hold against them, is water under the bridge, any more than similarly aged PhDs like myself, who believed the propaganda and bad predictions regarding the supposed vast increase in available professor positions set to arise by the late 90s, can do anything to change their choices, as well... now what?

I'm from logging country. 30 years ago the timber industry sounded all sorts of alarms.  Not all loggers, but many, simply refused to believe that their livelihood was endangered and then reacted with fury and obstinacy when the logging towns began dying.  They threatened, they held rallies, they slaughtered spotted owls. They refused to leave their towns or receive retraining.   Surviving now in an industry which is teetering, I understand some of this----and I appreciate your predicament the same as mine.  Logging was not just a job, it was a lifestyle; it was where one lived, what one did with one's life, who one associated with, how one dressed, the environment one worked , what one did with one's future.  Same as us.

But this sort of scenario is not a choice we make but a choice that is thrust upon us.  This is what having an agile mine is all about.  The "now what" is one's ability to move on. Otherwise I am not sure what your question is about.

Just like all of the smaller educational institutions going under, and for the same reasons.
It will be interesting to see how academics "move on".

[polly_mer]

Fine. A year, then. Maybe two. What is the alternative?

Sighing heavily about the increasing reality that we don't need the majority of the adults in US society to work to keep the rest of us going.  That's not an education problem.  That's a problem that results from a combination of automation, better technology, and changes in mindset about what needs to be done.  The secretarial pools are basically gone as each person enters their own data and types their own email until you get high enough to have an executive assistant, which is far more than a secretary.  Many of the clerk positions are gone, again as the clients/students/public enter their own data into the online forms.  A lot of the entry-level positions that allowed one to climb a corporate ladder are simply gone because we don't need them any more.

Maybe...kind'a...or not.

I know that you are well informed enough to have seen articles like this and this.

And there is a study (I don't feel like searching for it right now) that looks at the attitudes toward agricultural technology at the turn of the 20th century----people had very much the same fears about automation that we do, yet overall employment and wealth increased because of all the new machine-based jobs steadily created since the industrial revolution.

In other words, it is doubtful that we have killed opportunity through cyber-technology.  Elder jobs (such as telephone operators) are extinct, obviously, but other jobs took their place.  We should see the same phenomenon again.  The problem, it seems to me, rests with people (coal miners, loggers) who cannot adjust and lack the capital and foresight to do so.  Agile minds make for better Darwinian possibilities.  This is where education comes in: hail education!!

What education exactly do you suggest for people who are of below average intelligence and thus will not be able to learn the new complicated things?

We're already seeing the problems in the next transition when what most people can do is not sufficient to be competitive for the next set of jobs because education alone is insufficient to grant the creativity and other aspects of the jobs that cannot be automated and that will continue to be paid well.  The care taking jobs are taking longer to automate, but you should keep an eye on the Japanese caretaker robot industry.

Yes, the cries have been coming for decades, just like they have been coming to point out that a PhD alone is not enough (one of my favorite books that should be dated and isn't: https://www.amazon.com/PhD-Not-Enough-Survival-Science/dp/0465022227).

The question isn't whether automation will kill a lot of middle class jobs.  The question is when will we hit the point at which average people cannot get a middle class job, especially those who don't start solidly middle class as kids?  https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americas-middle-class-is-slowly-being-wiped-out-2018-07-23 overviews much of the problem.

[tuxthepenguin]

What exactly do you suggest that those coal miners and other middle aged working class folks from dying industries do?

1. Move. It's what I did.
2. Retrain
3. Take advantage of the social safety net (most of them vote against the social safety net)

To a large extent, these workers were raised in an environment that told them they were "not the academic type" and "don't need education". They were brainwashed from a young age. Trust me on this. I lived through it. Many of the kids I grew up with drank the Kool-Aid.

With the automation that's taking place over the next few decades, the only available jobs will require many years of education. We need to recognize that. Maybe not a history degree, but education. There's no alternative.

[Wahoo Redux]

What education exactly do you suggest for people who are of below average intelligence and thus will not be able to learn the new complicated things?

We're already seeing the problems in the next transition when what most people can do is not sufficient to be competitive for the next set of jobs because education alone is insufficient to grant the creativity and other aspects of the jobs that cannot be automated and that will continue to be paid well. 

The question isn't whether automation will kill a lot of middle class jobs.  The question is when will we hit the point at which average people cannot get a middle class job, especially those who don't start solidly middle class as kids? 

Sure, but I think you've just pointed out the basically unfair nature of the world.  There is no guarantee that anyone is going to prosper, particularly in capitalistic societies.  Intelligence is often a limiting factor, as is sanity, upbringing, substance abuse, etc. etc.  New technologies may actually leave some people locked out of the brave new world.  The old factory jobs of the industrial revolution were not necessarily any more demanding than agricultural work, actually I think they were much easier physically albeit more monotonous and dangerous.  People adjusted.

I'm just pointing out that we've been here before and all the news is not all bad.  Capitalism tends to go through waves of contraction and expansion, the invisible hand and all that.  I don't know enough to conjecture about "the point" you refer to above.  All we can do is hope and keep our heads.  Oh, and vote Democrat.

From https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americas-middle-class-is-slowly-being-wiped-out-2018-07-23

For teachers with children, the problem is compounded by a decrease in salaries, benefits and general job security. The situation is equally dire for teachers of grade school, high school or college.

"These days, professors may be more likely than their students to be living in basement apartments and subsisting on ramen and Tabasco," she writes.

At the professorial level, more colleges than ever, driven by bloated administrative bureaucracies, are relying on adjunct professors who receive low wages and no benefits. In the book, Quart cites one survey that found that 62% of adjunct professors earn less than $20,000 a year from teaching.

If education is the lynch-pin on the future, we're sure blowing it.